In November, an improbably riveting trial began in a courtroom in Foley Square in Lower Manhattan. The case was about a single sentence in the federal government’s endless output of forms and queries. It was also a defining clash over American identity.
The plaintiffs in the trial, 18 states and five immigrant rights groups, have charged Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who oversees the United States Census Bureau, with threatening to “fatally undermine” the accuracy of the 2020 count by inserting an 11th question into the census form: “Is this person a citizen of the United States?” The case gets to the heart of a project that is the federal government’s largest peacetime mission. CONT.
Emily Bazelon, New York Times Magazine